What do you do on a Saturday night if you’re not going out? Watch the television. Next question: what if there is absolutely nothing on television worth watching? Hire a video or DVD. Sorry, but next question: what if all the DVD hire shops round your way have lately closed down?

This answer is trickier, but I have it: make sure you have renewed your sub at the local library and take out a DVD from there at a modest cost of £2 for a three day hire.

And so it came to pass that on Saturday night — putting aside nostalgic memories of Dixon of Dock Green and the Billy Cotton Band Show in the good old days — I watched a stunning ten-year old film about the history of former Yugoslavia, Underground, directed by Emir Kusturica. It looked promising from the blurb and was garlanded with the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1995.

It was a corker, half an hour too long maybe (which film isn’t?) but riveting, funny, bizarre and tragic in its account of post-War disintegration and betrayal in that blighted Balkan region.

And fifteen minutes in, I realised that the great watery-eyed actor playing one of the three leads was my fellow juror on the Bitef judging panel in Belgrade three years ago, Miki Manojlovic. I just hope this week’s theatre openings don’t seem too puny in comparison…

Most actors called Simon are thoroughly audible, in my experience — Simon Williams, the late Simon Cadell, Simon Callow…and Simon Russell Beale; as the latter revealed on Desert Island Discs this week, when he played Desdemona at school, he was commended for compensating in clarity for what he lacked in feminine charm.

And yet SRB was curiously muffled on the programme, as if he was too embarrassed to talk about himself. This was a touching display of modesty, but I’ve not heard so many lines gabbled and swallowed since Alan Rickman in his laid-back-in-lassitude phase in the 1980s.

SRB is a trained musician and it seems an age since we heard him sing on the stage, so it was good to be reminded of his highly developed musical taste, which ranged from Bach and Mahler to Sibelius, Peter Warlock and Ravel.

For anyone who missed the programme, his piece of ultimate choice was Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, his book the Cambridge Medieval History and his luxury a daily crossword flown in by pigeon post.

I had no problems hearing the former FT editor, now chairman of the CBI, Richard Lambert at Sadler’s Wells last night. In the interval of The Car Man, he left his party and crossed the foyer to greet me and announce at full volume: “We’ve decided: it’s thoroughly entertaining bollocks!” I’m looking forwarded to seeing this accredited judgement blazoned across future posters for the show.

I hope they lower the lights at the Old Vic tonight. The death of Ed Mirvish reminds us that the Toronto impresario saved the theatre and restored it to its present glory.

Then Sally Greene and the Old Vic trust saved it all over again, when it might have become a lap dancing joint or even worse, a dark, neglected ruin.

How precarious our theatres are, and how careless we are of their survival. A lot depends on the programme, of course. Kevin Spacey seemes to be on a roll at last, just as Anthony Clark is at Hampstead, or Nicholas Hytner at the National (Marianne Elliott’s new Saint Joan at the NT is the fourth of this director’s productions that suggest she might become an all-time great; the others were Therese Raquin and Pillars of the Community, both at the NT; and her glorious Cuban Much Ado for the RSC.)

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Nice to see The Observer making good their relationship with inveterate first nighter 82 year-old Blanche Marvin; she’s the person you see scuttling around theatre foyers and making a nuisance of herself, dressed like a night in old Baghdad.

Some years ago, the newspaper nearly took her to court after she was found recycling theatre articles (mine, actually) without acknowledgement or permission in one of her vanity publications.

These days, for reasons that escape me, she is taken seriously, even by the great guru Peter Brook. Still this doesn’t stop her shouting the odds at press conferences and being outrageously rude to theatre staff, as she was yesterday at Hampstead.

Artistic director Anthony Clark was announcing an autumn season including Antony Sher’s new play about Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, The Giant.

“This production contains nudity” is not a phrase that will recommend the play to old Blanche.
She took exception in the Observer piece to seeing “Harry Potter in the nude” in Equus, and found Ian McKellen’s willy-waving in King lear “absolutely vulgarising.”

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Not even the angry dun-coloured sea or a howling gale could dampen the spirits on an awayday to Blackpool to see the new show Forbidden at the Pleasure Beach. Second Saturday of July, and the vacancies in exclusive sea-front B&B’s — £20 per person per night and all you can eat breakfast buffet — were as plentiful as friends of the cast at a Christopher Biggins first night.

The English seaside holiday may be a forlorn and wilting tradition, but some people never say die: my colleague Robert Gore-Langton, for instance, who boldly strapped himself into the latest ride in the Pleasure Beach park, Infusion, and travelled upside down at 80mph in a bucket seat through a forest of jet sprays.

As we’d both just been on Valhalla — with Alistair Smith of The Stage; half-way through that terrifying ride, I heard myself screaming, “Alright, I give in, I will go and see Menopause the Musical” — and got thoroughly soaked already, I passed on this one and nibbled on my candyfloss.

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Have you ever seen Morris dancing? I didn’t know he could. Thank you, and good night. But Mark Morris dancing is something else. The American choreographer’s Barbican programme this week, Mozart Dances, defies description. It is simply one of the most inexplicably beautiful theatre shows I have ever seen.

One of Brian McMaster’s greatest services to humanity while running the Edinburgh Festival was to bring Mark Morris and his troupe to the annual beano year after year (five years running, I think). The music is always played live — “The least you can say about me is that I’m a great DJ,” Morris once said — and the dancers always graceful and sexy.

Morris not only brings out the best in his performers. He brings out the best in his audiences. We were brilliant at the Barbican last night: alive, alert and humming with pleasure. I sat behind composer Thomas Ades and next to the director Peter Sellars, who co-commissioned the work for his New Crowned Hope festival in Vienna, and had the great pleasure of introducing one to the other.

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In a slow London theatre week, it was time to check out a couple of far-flung favourites. The BAC on Lavender Hill was showing Food, a hit at the Traverse last Edinburgh Festival, and Wilton’s Music Hall, which has just been named as one of the World Monument Fund’s top hundred most endangered sites for 2008, a rare Handel oratorio.

Food, in its tale of a celebrity chef cracking up under the pressure of winning his third Michelin star, draws fascinating parallels between performance in the kitchen and on the stage.

And the Handel — The Triumph of Time and Enlightenment — is a stark morality, a struggle between Pleasure and Time for the soul of Beauty, played out with brilliant use of video cameras, subtitles, modern costume and a nine-piece band playing baroque period instruments.

These kinds of occasions shake up your stock responses to theatre and renew the appetite. Food certainly did, after the lousy Chinese meal I snatched en route from Clapham Junction. But BAC is as welcoming as ever once you arrive. I can’t wait to see how Punchdrunk occupy the labyrinth with their Masque of the Red Death in October.

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That smooth, unruffled actor Peter Bowles suprised the Chichester Minerva audiences at the weekend by walking off the stage fifteen minutes into The Waltz of Toreadors saying that he had to go and look after his cat. The rest of the performance was cancelled, but at least pussy got her bowl of milk.

Bowles being Bowles, the exit would have been perfectly timed. Unlike that of the Irish actor Alan Devlin who, a few years ago, walked off the stage in a frightful muddle, saying “**** this for a game of soldiers, I’m off to the pub.” One can sympathise with this attitude quite often in the theatre, but it’s not very helpful to the rest of the cast.

Walking off is fairly rare, much rarer than it might be, given that actors are highly strung beasts, whatever the emotional exterior, and audiences are usually either badly behaved, badly dressed or just somnolently indifferent to their work.

Nicol Williamson walked off the stage quite often when he was playing Hamlet in the 1960s, an example followed twenty years later by Daniel Day-Lewis in the same role at the National. Day-Lewis was overcome with apparitions of his own father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis, instead of his stage father, Claudius. All very confusing.

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Which do you prefer? The send-up or the source? The satire or the thing spoofed? I ask because of an extraordinary conjunction of events. One night recently I went to The Drowsy Chaperone at the Novello which had everyone, except me, giggling into their G ‘n’ Ts. The next night I was in Chichester for Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms which had the whole audience, myself included, dancing on air. The difference was incredible. The West End show invited superior laughter; the one in Chichester took us rapturously out of our selves.

Obviously there is room for musical satire. The late and much-lamented Dick Vosburgh and Frank Lazarus some years back did a smashing show called A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine which re-created the madcap world of Marx Brothers movies. It played in small venues and loved what it lampooned. The Drowsy Chaperone, however, is a large-scale show caught in a vice of its own making. On the one hand, it suggests there is something a bit sad about lonely, cardiganed men playing LPs of forgotten musicals; on the other, it implies the kind of 1920s show the hero conjures up had a reckless gaiety we have long since lost.

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